"Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the the Perl Porters, have taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly academic languages and blended them with Perl's pragmatic view to practicality and usefulness."

I have some personal experience with that unfortunately. The use of Perl in production environments has led to some painful issues, mainly due to its tendency to become obfuscated and incomprehensible, which is the last thing you want when the crap hits the fan several minutes before market-open and even guy who originally wrote the script struggles to understand it.

I've found that the environment tends to be more supportable with simple shell scripts and occasionally Python for the more complex stuff, especially when we are under pressure to rapidly diagnose and address an immediate production issue.

As the old saying goes, "You can write Fortran in any language." Both languages are great, and people can code either well. That said, Python encourages clean code, whereas Perl, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that it encourages messy code, at least does not discourage it either.

In other words, while the programmer's still at fault, IMHO Perl is the equivalent to putting an alcoholic in a bar while telling him to only drink soda, while Python puts the alcoholic into a brightly-colored candy store instead.

We have developed an IVR product, counting over million lines of code. The trainees of the project once trained in Perl and exposed to the coding style, have always picked up and maintained it on their own. Would approach us only for functional queries!

While you may be able to do everything in Perl, it doesn't mean the you always should. While the Perl defenders will claim that it is always the fault of the programmer, which is true since the code isn't writing itself, it does not negate the fact that Perl is a language that lends itself particularly well to incomprehensible code. Certainly far more so than Ruby or Python.

But each to their own. There needs to be an appreciation of the applicability of differing programming languages to differing problems and environments. Perl has its place, along with its good and bad points, as do all other languages.